Leaving Cancun

Well we've been hitting the net pretty hard over the last couple of days, partially due to the large amount of emailing to be done and also getting to check out the new comments. But that exciting phase has drawn to a close as we count down the last couple of hours before we jump onto an overnight bus to Ciudad Cuahutemuco - on the border with Guatemala - for some reason you can't catch a bus directly through to Guatemala or Belize, but have to catch a bus to a border town then get a new ticket for your destination in the next country.

There would be plenty of things we could see and do in Mexico before heading south but it wouldn't be doing the place justice to skip through a couple of towns, I think Mexico will need to be part of South/Central America Mach II.

Cancun has been a taste from home for a couple days, and despite my socialist rant earlier we have enjoyed a couple of the luxuries such as air conditioning in shops and tasty mexican food, but we are bored again now as Cancun is really just the Gold Coast with ordinary beaches, plus thousands of drunk american kids (not exaggerating).

I also wanted to list a couple more of my observations from Cuba before I forget them, hopefully these are fairly benign and won't induce the wrath of too many people.

- Instead of calling out to each other something like 'oi' to grab your attention, Cubans say 'pssst' - as loudly as is necessary if you are a good 100m away. I'm told this is a trick learnt from the Soviet Secret Police.
- Most of the builings we saw in Havana were still in the colonial style with beautiful pillared buildings lining all the streets.
- When I went and visited some of the housing estates in the outer suburbs of Havana the exteriors of the buildings (like most of Cuba) were very delapidated, however upon entering the apartments they were nicely furnished and looked very comfortable. The inference I made was that due to the lack of a housing market the incentive to add value to the exterior of your house was practically non-existent whereas the interior of the dwelling provides you with more utility if it is nicely kept. Not something that I saw as a problem. As long as the exterior works, it's not important if it looks shabby.
- The vast majority of cars are those big old style cars you see from the 60's. I don't know what they are called, but they looked pretty cool.
- There is a dual currency system in Cuba. Convertible Pesos (roughly equal to a USD$) and the Cuban Peso (24 pesos per Convertible Peso). In general, luxury items that might be purchased by tourists or wealthy Cubans, such air conditioned buses, marginally more upmarket restaurants, taxis, hotels etc were charged in convertible pesos, whereas the essential living items, such as bread and beans and fruit are sold in Cuban pesos, at a signifantly cheaper price than products sold in Convertible pesos. A trap it seems most tourists fell into was to pay Convertivle pesos for products sold in Cuban Pesos, living and travelling is vastly cheaper if you can manage to work with Cuban pesos wherever possible.
- There is a strong barrier put up between Cubans and tourists. There are hotels for Cubans and hotels for tourists. Although I'm pretty sure anyone can stay in a Cas Particular. There is an expensive bus company that we were made to use (unless there was a truck running), and a cheaper less comfortable bus company for Cubans.

Anyway, that was some more of what we saw.